Constance Mirabelli, a widowed bookkeeper with a jolly laugh and a love of riding city buses, had a rent-controlled apartment in the West Village and a burial plot in a Catholic cemetery before she was placed under a guardianship in 1999 at her landlord’s initiative.
“I’m not dilapidated yet,” Ms. Mirabelli told the psychiatrist sent by the city after her landlord complained that she was incontinent and sometimes let the bathtub overflow. “I can still kick pretty good.”
Four years, two guardians and two nursing homes later, Ms. Mirabelli died at 91. And despite her plot at St. John Cemetery in Queens, despite a $2,000 burial fund culled from her modest pension and preserved by court order, Ms. Mirabelli was among the last of 137 bodies to be lowered into Trench 307 in February 2004.
The guardian responsible for her at the time, Jo Ann Douglas, was a lawyer known for lucrative appointments as a law guardian for children in celebrity divorces. In her final accounting, she wrote that she had arranged “appropriate transport and burial for Ms. Mirabelli” — not specifying that she meant a city morgue truck and a pauper’s grave. Questioned 10 years later, Ms. Douglas found nothing in her old notes to explain her decision. “Do you know if she can be moved to St. John’s?” she asked in an email, seeking a way to undo the past.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html